London 2012 will probably generate a better legacy. It is the first one to think more about how to “end” an event, rather than how to open an event.

If there is a radical difference between the London Olympics and all the other great sporting or cultural events ever organised anywhere else in the world, it lies in the issue of legacy. What in the rest of the world has amounted to little more than ill-defined concepts, outcomes or commitments gone up in smoke, has become in London an overriding imperative that stands a very good chance of revolutionising the use of the word legacy itself. Before London, the issue of what might happen after a major event was discussed in a general way – what would happen to structures that would be obsolete once the party was over, permanent benefits of investment in public transport that would counterbalance the ephemeral nature of the event itself, and so on – but legacy, with its negative as well as positive overtones, has almost never been mentioned. The sheer structural effort that has gone into the forthcoming Olympics will make legacy and all the ideas that go with it – the shift in attention from the short to the long term, the assessment of social as well as strictly entrepreneurial interests and benefits, and above all a more visionary approach to urban transformation – an accepted part of everyday language. For starters, London’s candidacy was entirely predicated on the upgrading of a huge swathe of the existing city, the Lower Lea Valley east of the “cool” neighbourhoods of Hackney and Victoria Park, and north of Canary Wharf, the business and residential area that has become an icon of 1990s development. The location isn’t just an empty hole in which to set down an event in exchange for a couple of underground stations, but (in part) a poverty-stricken area one and a half the size of Venice (2.5 million sqm) which, thanks to the leverage of the Games, will receive some £20 million of targeted investment. This groundbreaking concept has been accompanied by major changes to procedures in which both the event and its legacy have been planned right from the start, simultaneously. The aim is to avoid white elephants – buildings and structures that might turn out to be useless and costly to run once the Games are over. To make such ecologically and economically sustainable planning a reality means thinking about temporary and permanent transformation as parallel processes, and handling the shift from the one to the other in new and original ways. Working out two separate masterplans for the same site means not just replacing sports facilities (stadiums and athletics tracks) with home, office, retail and other more urban functions, but also morphing a totally enclosed and controlled site designed for a mass event into an open, integrated, fully accessible district, as East London should be.

A bird’s eye view of the Olympic Stadium and in the background the Canary Wharf skyscrapers. The stadium can host 80,000 spectators, which is what is necessary for the events, but superfluous for London when the Games will be over. To solve this problem the stadium has been structured in two parts: a permanent one for 25,000 persons, and the flexible part to be dismantled after the Games and sold to Glasgow or Rio de Janeiro.

Partly thanks to the River Lea and the natural contouring of the land, the Olympic Park will become Elizabeth Park, one of Britain’s finest public parks, the Olympic Village will be converted into a residential complex of 3600 apartments, and a set of service buildings will be demolished to provide a platform for new uses and functions, while Stratford, with two stations just 7 minutes from central London, plus new cultural and retail facilities, will be extensively revitalised as well as receiving a significant property-market boost. One of the most interesting features of the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), the government body set up to oversee the physical and infrastructural planning of London 2012, is its plans for the temporary buildings. For example, after the Games are over the basketball stadium will be dismantled and moved to Glasgow or Rio de Janeiro, while the main stadium and Zaha Hadid’s Aquatic Centre will be downsized from 80,000 and 25,000 seats to 17,500 and 3500 respectively. In the four years since the awarding of Games (in July 2005) the decision-making process, as often happens in such cases, has been centralised, planning has gone into emergency mode as the clock ticks remorselessly on, and local councils, a force to be reckoned with at local level, have been stripped of authority However, late 2009 has seen the creation of the legacy-oriented Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC) which includes representatives of the area’s Five Boroughs (Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Greenwich, Newham and Waltham Forest). Its task is to oversee the long-term transformation, from now until 2020-2030, of the segregated Olympic Park into an open urban space capable of attracting a mixed residential population. In other words, the Legacy Masterplan Framework (LMF) drawn up by EDAW/Allies & Morrison Architects mainly to determine the cubic capacity of buildings and structures will be adapted and reshaped around policies to be agreed with the local population. The big unknown in this seemingly perfect process is the continuing assurance of quality – in buildings, public spaces and the urban fabric generally – as the banking and business crisis gradually takes its toll on the project. In a major financial capital like London, the issue of quality obviously rests on private investment. An input of capital into an operation like this, like any state-backed mega-event, guarantees maximum return at minimum risk. The international bubble that has burst over the Games during one of the most crucial phases in their financing threatens not the event itself, but the quality of its legacy, whose main assumption is being undermined. When times are hard, unless the Games have their own funding, it becomes difficult for the authorities to impose quality standards and notions of the wider public good in the private sphere. In 2012 there will be at least two alternative scenarios, whose outcomes may prove to be a major influence on the entire world system of large-scale events. If stock-market uncertainty really does prevent a glorious return to private investment in the City, the elegantly-contrived legacy plans may ultimately fail, dragging down with them (proportionally to the extent of the failure) public and private faith in large-scale events as indispensable instruments of urban transformation. The opposite scenario is that the Olympics may truly save the day as both an incentive for and a driving-force behind private investment worldwide. If this happens, London may experience the sharpest eastward swerve in its history.

Zaha Hadid’s Aquatic Centre, with two 50-m pools and a 25-m pool. After the Games it will be downsized from 17,500 seats to 3500 seats.

The International Monetary Fund was the first to announce, a few years...

18 February 2018

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